tlay, having to pay the Pope's
police an hundred scudi a-month for information.

At last mid-day came, and off we started for Rome. We trundled down the
street at a tolerable pace; and one could not help feeling that every
revolution of the wheel brought him nearer the Eternal City. Suddenly
our course was brought to an unexpected stop. Another examination of
passports and baggage at the gate! not, I verily believe, in the hope of
finding contraband wares, but of having a pretext to exact a few more
pauls. The half-hour wore through, though wearily. The gate was flung
open; and there lay before us a blackened expanse, stretching far and
wide, dreary and death-like, terminated here by the sea, and there by
the horizon,--the Campagna di Roma. I turned for relief to the ocean,
all angry with tempest as it was; and felt that its struggling billows
were a more agreeable sight than the tomb-like stillness of the plain.
The sirocco was still blowing; and the largest breakers I ever saw were
tumbling on the beach. The only bright and pleasant thing in the
picture was the shining, sandy coast, with its margin of white foam. It
ran off in a noble crescent of fifty miles, and was seen in the far
distance terminating in the low sandy promontory of Fumacina, where the
Tiber falls into the sea. Alas! what vicissitudes had that coast been
witness to! There, where the idle wave was now rolling, rode in other
days the galleys of Rome; and there, where the stifling sirocco was
sweeping the herbless plain, rose the villas of her senators, amid the
bloom and fragrance of the orange and the olive. To that coast Caesar had
loved to come, to inhale its breezes, and to pass, in the society of his
select friends, those hours which ambition left unoccupied. But what a
change now! There was no sail on that sea; there was no dwelling on that
shore: the scene was lonely and desolate, as if keel had never ploughed
the one, nor human foot trodden the other.

I had seated myself in front of the vehicle, in the hope of catching the
first glimpse of St Peter's, as its dome should emerge above the plain;
but so wretched were our cattle, that though we started at mid-day, and
had only fifty miles of road, night fell long before we reached the
gates of the Eternal City. I saw the country well, however, so long as
daylight lasted. We kept in sight of the shore for twenty-five miles;
and glad I was of it; for the waves, with their crest of snow and voice
of